It was a full weekend of avant-garde sound gigs in the city, with January Hunt / Parasite Nurse / Omei / Drumloop & Scant on Scholes St on Saturday, Robbie Wing / Mark Cetilia & Eric Wong / Iris Our at Figure 8 Recording on Monday, and this in between. It was the only one I was able to make it to, but it was more than enough to take in. It was the second in an ongoing series organized by Stepien and Kieran Morris (Negation) at Stone Circle Theater, the after-hours arts space alter ego of Ridgewood Presbyterian. It’s always a pleasure to attend shows there; it’s a nice change of pace to sit in the pews and see artists play facemelting sets in front of a full stained-glass fixture, even if gets chilly during the colder months.
NEGATION closed out the first installment of the series back in May, so to switch it up he played first this time. Those who have had the honor of witnessing one of Morris’s sets (they’re few and far between, and sometimes not even then) know that each is unique, exhaustively prepared and adapted to the given atmosphere. His last was powered by a rare sampler-based approach that yielded one of his most impressive performances yet, so I was eager to hear what he came up with this time. Though it was back to the tried-and-true modular setup, Morris played an especially reserved piece, beginning with a stripped-down sine drone and rumbling sub bass. The way he sowed crawly, feeler-like textures that eventually took the stage in a signature stereo-jumping cut-up web was mesmerizing. The end was abrupt, to the point that it seemed like he might have cut it short, but still excellent.
BERGSONIST, the moniker of Selwa Abd, is a name I’ve heard but I’d never seen her play. A quick skim of her formidable discography led me to expect some techno-ish rhythmic electronica, so I was pleasantly surprised at her free-flowing electroacoustics. After a distorted chant-sample overture Abd transitioned into an extended meditation on tactile sounds that sounded like processed field recordings, lots of synthetic trickling and shuffling that gradually became more organic, but always threatened by harsh electrical hum and buzz. As the slow fadeout brought everything to a close, I realized I’d been in a sort of trance with no idea how much time had passed. The near total darkness probably helped in that regard. Great stuff.
It was lovely to finally meet LA-based phenom ELLEN PHAN after many years of online correspondence. It was her first time playing in the city since 2017 and it did not disappoint. She cut a striking silhouette against a bath of deep red light, a color scheme that made her performance seem all the more hellish. Much of her previous work is very pure, neutral glitch, not sterile by any means but also not imbued with a particular emotional slant. This, on the other hand, was vicious and confrontational, drawing brutal force from dense spectrum distortion and punishing, machinic repetition. We had talked about the work of contemporary and fellow Angelino Sunik Kim before the show, and I feel like I heard some influence in the intentional momentum disruption and stubborn circuitousness. A highlight was the use of voice samples from her young son, an uncanny moment of harrowing irreality. A spectacular set that I’ll be thinking about for a while.
The collaboration of KIRAN ARORA & MADELINE STEPIEN concluded the night and was the best set I’ve seen from either artist, clearly well composed and representative of each of their styles. There were times at which you could discern the two strands, writhing and rearing peripherally, and then there were times when they would weave together in a single mass of heavy digital noise. The challenge of making visceral computer music—a pursuit that interests both Arora and Stepien—is processing and structuring your material in such a way that it transcends the tradition’s inherent abstraction and becomes a grounded, truly physical experience, and they definitely achieved that here. Here’s hoping a CD is in the works.
